Case Study: URS Corporation achieves quicker, cost‑saving dam safety assessments with ANSYS DesignXplorer VT

URS Corporation - Customer Case Study

URS Corporation, a global civil engineering firm, was engaged to evaluate McKelvey Lake Dam to determine whether repeated freeze‑thaw cycles had compromised its structural integrity for increased flood loads. The project faced the typical challenge of expensive, time‑consuming field sampling and many individual finite‑element analyses because engineers initially did not know which parameters most strongly affected dam behavior. To streamline the assessment, URS used ANSYS DesignXplorer VT from ANSYS.

Using ANSYS DesignXplorer VT, URS performed sensitivity and parametric studies that produced response surfaces from a single FE solution, quickly identifying foundation modulus as the dominant influence on dam behavior. The ANSYS tool allowed URS to narrow the scope of field investigations, reduce time and cost (and in some cases eliminate sampling), demonstrate the dam’s ability to redistribute loads across a range of scenarios, and present clear graphical results that sped regulatory review and approval.

URS Corporation

Guy Lund

Senior Project Engineer